Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, proudly announces our contribution to Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems, a recently released title available from Wiley. The book covers innovative social-behavioral modeling in diverse domains, such as national security and online social gaming, and provides techniques to help scientists model and better understand human behavior.

Our team of scientists and engineers authored two chapters. In the chapter “Combining Data‐Driven and Theory‐Driven Models for Causality Analysis in Sociocultural Systems,” Dr. Amy Sliva and Dr. Scott Neal Reilly discuss how scientists can best understand and describe sociocultural systems.

“Scientists must accurately capture social, political, and economic models that account for causal and predictive dynamics,” explains Dr. Neal Reilly, Senior Vice President at Charles River Analytics. “Causality is, however, notoriously difficult to analyze. We discuss how we can model causal relationships by incorporating multiple domains of study and a variety of analytic methods.”

“Using Sociocultural Data from Online Gaming and Game Communities” was authored by scientists Sean Guarino, Leonard Eusebi, Dr. Bethany Bracken, and Dr. Michael Jenkins. In this chapter, our scientists explore how researchers can use games and game communities to study large‐population behaviors in partially controlled settings.

Game communities provide researchers with rich sociocultural data. Our authors describe the characteristics of data, and the challenges that researchers face to access and interpret it. The chapter also includes three case studies and provides future research recommendations.

Our research contributions to Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems illustrate our cross-disciplinary approach, with scientists and engineers from our Decision Management and Human Effectiveness divisions contributing to the publication.

Learn more about our efforts in Socio-Cultural Modeling/Reasoning.